Git Colors – How to Colorize Output of Git

bashcolorsgit

Is there a way to color output for git (or any command)?

Consider:

baller@Laptop:~/rails/spunky-monkey$ git status
# On branch new-message-types
# Changes not staged for commit:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
#   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
#       modified:   app/models/message_type.rb
#
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
baller@Laptop:~/rails/spunky-monkey$ git add app/models

And

baller@Laptop:~/rails/spunky-monkey$ git status
# On branch new-message-types
# Changes to be committed:
#   (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
#
#       modified:   app/models/message_type.rb
#

The output looks the same, but the information is totally different: the file has gone from unstaged to staged for commit.

Is there a way to colorize the output? For example, files that are unstaged are red, staged are green?

Or even Changes not staged for commit: to red and # Changes to be committed: to green?

Working in Ubuntu.

EDIT: Googling found this answer which works great: git config --global --add color.ui true.

However, is there any more general solution for adding color to a command output?

Best Answer

You can create a section [color] in your ~/.gitconfig with e.g. the following content

[color]
  diff = auto
  status = auto
  branch = auto
  interactive = auto
  ui = true
  pager = true

You can also fine control what you want to have coloured in what way, e.g.

[color "status"]
  added = green
  changed = red bold
  untracked = magenta bold

[color "branch"]
  remote = yellow

I hope this gets you started. And of course, you need a terminal which supports colour.

Related Solutions

Colorize filenames based on status for git diff –name-status

I dont know of any official way to do it, but I wrote this just now and it works for me.
Put the bash script below into a file called: color_git_diff.sh (or whatever you want)

#!/usr/bin/env bash

for i in "$@"
do
    if  grep -q "^M" <<< "$i"
    then
        echo -e "\e[33m $i \e[0m"
    elif  grep -q "^D" <<< "$i"
    then
        echo -e "\e[31m $i \e[0m"
    fi
done

to apply the script you would call it with:

git diff --name-status | xargs --delimiter="\n" ./color_git_diff.sh

Obviously you wouldnt want to call this everytime so you would need to put it into your bashrc and assign a function or an alias to it - or something like that.
This only produces colorised output for modified or deleted files and I made modified files yellow - I dont know what the ansi escape code is for blue off the top of my head - I think maybe \e[36m ? anyway if you want to use it you can add it yourself-

Bash – Is it possible to change font colors in the terminal, without impacting printf’s “%*s” padding format

You're making this a lot more complicated than it should be. You can handle alignment with $message and not care about the width of ANSI sequences:

#! /usr/bin/env bash

message() {
    [ x"$2" = xOK ] && color=2 || color=1
    let offset=$(tput cols)-4-${#2}
    printf "%-*s[ %s%s%s ]\n" $offset "$1" "$(tput setaf "$color")"  "$2" "$(tput sgr0)"
}  

message "install font library" "OK"
message "update configuration file on server" "ERR"

Edit: Please note that most printf(1) implementations don't cope well with lengths calculations for multibyte charsets. So if you want to print messages with accented characters in UTF-8 you might need a different approach. shrug

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